"Spiral" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... who were carrying me ascended a spiral stairway which led to an immense hall where beds were laid together in three lines, so close that they touched each other. On one of these beds I was placed, in the midst of oaths, cries for pity, and muttered complaints from hundreds of fever-stricken ...
— The Conscript - A Story of the French war of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... went through the inner lock-door. He saw that the interior of the ship was stripped and bare. But a spiral stairway descended from some upper compartment. It had a handrail of pure, transparent, water-clear plastic. The walls were bare insulation, but that trace of luxury remained. Pop gazed at ...
— Scrimshaw • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... it almost made one dizzy to watch them. Sometimes they would seem to be standing straight up, facing each other for a few seconds, then they would whirl over and over in regular somersaults, suddenly darting high up in the air, sailing down, at last, in a regular spiral, and landing on the grass right in front ...
— Hollow Tree Nights and Days • Albert Bigelow Paine
... inspecting every cone, cranny and knot hole, chirping his fine, high-keyed notes, sometimes in a querulous tone, and again in the most cheerful and good-natured temper imaginable, now gliding up a tree trunk, now scudding down head foremost, anon circling in a spiral course. ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... quarrel of his own accord? I think I see. We find in Algeria a Beetle known as Drilus maroccanus, who, though non-luminous, approaches our Glow-worm in his organization and especially in his habits. He too feeds on land molluscs. His prey is a Cyclostome with a graceful spiral shell, tight-closed with a stony lid which is attached to the animal by a powerful muscle. The lid is a movable door which is quickly shut by the inmate's mere withdrawal into his house and as easily opened when the hermit goes forth. With this ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... parasol was constructed with jointed ribs so as to fold back, and was likewise self-opening. The rod was a metallic tube, and contained a spiral spring which acted upon and pressed upwards an inner rod. To this inner rod were jointed the stretchers, which in this construction were placed above the ribs instead of below, as in the ordinary ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... blackened pages of the books he loved so well. A corner of a page of St. Augustine's Confessions was turned towards him and lay on a singed fragment of Aldonza's embroidered curtain, while a little red flame was licking the spiral folds of the screw, trying, as it were, to gather energy to do more than blacken it. Ambrose could have wept over it at any other moment, but now he could only catch up a brand—it was the leg of his master's carved chair—and run back ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the ascent to Falconhurst easier and safer, a spiral staircase was built in the trunk of the huge tree whose branches upheld the "Nest." This is the "task" spoken of in the opening paragraph ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... little orb-weaving spider may have suggested this form of occupation. Be this as it may, the child who is a lover of nature will be quick to perceive the strong resemblance he bears to this little insect while at work with his toy knitter, going from post to post just as the insect worked its net in spiral form on ...
— Spool Knitting • Mary A. McCormack
... and they even ventured to guess what the earth's motive power might be. It was now five minutes of midnight. The chief furnished Ingram an oversuit and the young engineers dropped through manholes and down vertical and spiral ladders into the cellar of the steamer, the bottom of which was thirty feet below ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... in its journey across the ages, is a microcosm which has, like the world itself, successive stages of youth, maturity, and old age; but it never dies—it renews itself perpetually. It is not like a perfect circle; it is like a spiral, and in its growth is always mounting higher. I believe in making students follow the same path that art itself has followed, so that they shall undergo during their term of study the same transformations that music itself has undergone ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... repulsed from the bed of pain on which her husband lay and groaned, had drawn a charmed circle round about it. So near, yet kept at a distance; all-powerful, but in disgrace, the apparently devoted wife was lying in wait for death and opportunity; crouching like the ant-lion at the bottom of his spiral pit, ever on the watch for the prey that cannot escape, listening to the fall ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... end, was a door, and the man opened it with a key upon a bunch which he took from his pocket. They had to pass through two more doors before they came to the spiral staircase which led down into the gloomy depths beneath the ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... (comb-like); Fig. 20.—Stem 3 in. to 5 in. high, and about 3 in. in diameter, egg-shaped, unbranched, rarely producing offsets at the base. Ribs fifteen or sixteen, spiral, with closely-set cushions of stiff, whitish spines, which interlace and almost hide the stem; there are from fourteen to twenty-two spines to each cushion, and they are 1/4 in. long. Flowers produced on the ridges near the top of the stem; tube short, spiny; petals spreading, ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... and they hastily attired themselves, then cautiously peeped out at their door, since neither sight nor sound came to them from either window. The guard who had hindered their passage was no longer there, and Jean led the way down the spiral stairs. At the slit looking into the court they heard cries and the clash of arms, but it was too high above their heads for anything to be seen, ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... not too conical, may be covered with a spiral bandage. Each turn ascends at a slight angle, with one edge of the bandage a little tighter than the other. In putting on this kind of bandage it is necessary to learn to have the tight edges all of a uniform pressure and each turn overlap the turn below in such a way that ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... up by a narrow spiral staircase to the top of the tower, from whence we had a fine view over the whole of the bay and the surrounding shores. On the summit are the remnants of a lantern which was formerly used as a beacon for the benefit ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... as these were certainly never intended for use. They were probably put upon the table as ornaments. The bowl is a white glass cup, with wavy lines of light blue. The spiral stem is red and white, and has projecting from it five leaves of yellow glass, separated in the middle by another leaf of a deep blue color. The large ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... across the Spiral Arm, a sprawling sphere of influence vast, mighty, solid at the core. Only the far-flung boundary shows the slight ebb and flow of contingent cultures that may win a system or two today and lose them back tomorrow or a hundred years from now. Xanabar is the trading post of the galaxy, ...
— History Repeats • George Oliver Smith
... still stands, the finest relic of Norman civil architecture in England. It possessed great strength, and at the same time was richly ornamented with carving. The windows, arches, and fireplaces were decorated with chevron carvings. A beautiful spiral pattern enriched the doorway and pillars of the staircase leading to galleries cut in the thickness of the wall, with arched openings looking into the hall below. The outlook from the keep extended over the parishes of Castle Hedingham, Sybil Hedingham, ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... into a miniature whirlpool, grooved in a spiral and pleasant to see. Slowly the water went round and round, and so did the boat without any assistance from Jane. Watching this movement thoughtfully, she brought forth from her drenched pocket some sodden whitish ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... present extensive establishment. Entering through a large open gateway we find ourselves within a spacious courtyard with a handsome dwelling-house in the rear, and all the signs of a champagne business of magnitude apparent. A spiral staircase conducts to the counting-house on the first story of a range of buildings on the left hand, the ground floor of which is divided into celliers. Passing through a door by the side of this staircase we enter a large hall where the operation of bottling the wine is going ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... the world. In his exultation he raised his lantern aloft and swung it round and round with the abandon of a boy who tosses his cap in the air. Then he bounded down the iron staircase like a child let out of school, dashing round their spiral windings ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... apparition in the firelight—of the white face and the cloudy hair and the look of animosity and bitterness in the eyes. Never before had I been so profoundly convinced of the malignant will veiled by that thin figure. It was as if the visible form were only a spiral of grey smoke covering a ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... village had its common Maypole, gaily adorned with wreaths and flags and ribbons, and sometimes painted in spiral lines of colour. The Welsh Maypoles seem to have been made from birch-trees, elms were used in Cornwall, and young oaks in other parts of England. Round these Maypoles the young villagers danced, and green booths were often set up on the ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Indian guides. The pace was set at an ambling run over rocks that had cut Ledyard's boots to tatters before nightfall. He was quite unarmed; and just at dark the way seemed to end at a sandy shore, where the waves were already chopping over on the rising tide, and spiral columns of smoke betrayed the underground mud huts of those very Indian villages that had massacred the Russians a quarter of a century before. The guides had dived somewhere underground and, while Ledyard stood nonplussed, came running back ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... this gigantic granite jewel which is as light as a bit of lace, covered with towers, with slender belfries to which spiral staircases ascend, and which raise their strange heads that bristle with chimeras, with devils, with fantastic animals, with monstrous flowers, and which are joined together by finely carved arches, to the blue sky by day, and to ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... they go when the very distinct-faced clock (adjusted to literary eye-sight) proclaims closing time? The tragic-faced gentleman, for instance, with the corkscrew ringlets that bob up and down like spiral springs as he walks? Or the short, elderly gentleman in the black cassock and bowler hat, who shatters your nerves by turning suddenly and revealing himself as a middle-aged woman? Whither do they go? One never ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... the letter taken from his pocket and the table—on which stood a glass of lemonade and a spiral wax candle—moved close to the bed, and putting on his spectacles he began reading. Only now in the stillness of the night, reading it by the faint light under the green shade, did he grasp its meaning ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... details of the conversation have not been preserved. However, we find in Morse's report, on page 10, the following: "In 1825, Mr. Sturgeon, of England, made the first electro-magnet in the horseshoe form by loosely winding a piece of iron wire with a spiral of copper wire. In the United States, as early as 1831, the experimental researches of Professor Joseph Henry were of great importance in advancing the science of electro-magnetism. He may be said to have carried the electro-magnet, ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... was a pleasant young lady, who sat in a very pretty boat, rowed by a trusty man. She had hovered round and round the Rob Roy with a cautious propriety, which, however, could not conceal a certain wistful gaze as the narrowing spiral of her course brought her nearer at each turn. My little dingey was the attraction, and the lady confessed boldly that she "would so like to have a boat like that to row in." Next she consented to see dinner cooked on the Rob Roy, and—just because she was a lady—she ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... heard?" As they huddled in the shelter of the monument she brooded over the plain below wherein the canal, livid, yet unfrozen still, half girdled the town in a serpentine fold. Each chimney curled a light spiral into the nipping air. "Under every one a wagging tongue," she said. "It's known to ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... Tattooing of the Head-hunter Bontok Igorot Constabulary Soldiers Bontok Igorot Slapping Game Gansas with Human Jaws as Handles Women and Girls Wearing Banana-leaf Skirts New School-house, Bontok Valley of the Rio Chico Kalinga Girl Looking Down the Rio Chico Spiral Camote Patch Madallam, Kalinga Headman Two Headmen of Lubuagan Kalinga Warriors Typical Kalinga House Conference at Lubuagan View of Lubuagan, Capital of Kalinga Kalinga Head-ax Igorot Shield Ifugao Carved Bowl Ifugao Pipe, ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... an egg-shaped ring about the man in the center, who deftly joints and fits them with his snow knife. The second row is placed on top of the first, but sloping slightly inward; and the following rows are carried up in a gradually ascending spiral, each successive layer leaning inward a little more, and each block held in place by the blocks on either side, until finally an aperture is left in the top to ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... perceive that he was ablaze with excitement as he stared at the faint gray marks. "This one should be the index finger. I need not tell a man of your knowledge of the world that the pattern of it is a single-spiral whorl, with deltas symmetrically disposed. This, the print of the second finger, is a simple loop, with a staple core and fifteen counts. I know there are fifteen, because I have just the same two prints on this negative, which I have examined ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... men had seen the sunlight gleam on white steel far down in the valley. He had seen it several times—a long spiral flash, such as the sun would make on a fixed bayonet carried over the shoulder. Such a flash as this will carry twenty miles through a clear atmosphere; the spot pointed out by the sharp-eyed Goorkha was not more than ten miles distant. They stood in a group, this isolated little band, and ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... of light filtering through the tiny windows of the cupola millions of dust motes illuminated by the sun danced in an ascending spiral. The altar, with its antique carving, glowed faintly in the mellowed light with reflections of old gold. Upon it lay a duster and a pail, carelessly left since the last cleaning of the room, ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... come to a new phase of coastal scenery. From the high land above us green scrub-covered spur after spur shoots downward to the shore, enclosing numerous little beaches of coarse sand and many coloured spiral shells—"Reddies" we boys called them—with here and there a rare and beautiful cowrie of banded jet black and pearly white. The sea-wall of rock has here but few pools, being split up into long, deep, and narrow chasms, into which the gentle ocean swell ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... movement, rarely vibrating his pinions, he mounts and mounts in an ascending spiral till he appears a mere speck against the summer sky; then, if the mood seizes him, with wings half closed, like a bent bow, he will cleave the air almost perpendicularly, as if intent on dashing himself to pieces against the earth; but on nearing the ground he suddenly mounts again ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... floor. With my small spears I pried out dozens of them, Mao, starfish, clams, oysters, furbelowed clams, sea-urchins, and sponges. The mao is the turbo, the queer gastropod sold in the market in Papeete. He lives in a beautiful spiral shell, and has attached to him a round piece of polished shell, blue, green, brown, or yellow, which he puts aside when he wishes to feed on the morsels passing his door, and pulls shut when he wants privacy. He fits himself tightly into a hollow in the reef and dozes away the ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... astrogational and hyperspace instruments put in place. The hypership Andromeda was back from the Gamma System; there was close secrecy about what the expedition had found, but the newscasts were full of conjectures about Merlin, and the market went into another dizzy upward spiral. Litchfield Exploration & Salvage opened a huge munitions depot, and combat equipment, once almost unsalable, was selling as fast as it came out. The Government was buying some, but by no means all ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... sense, and some Blazed with ambition's wild, unsteady fire, And some were burnt i' the sockets black, and some Were dead as embers when the fire is out. A curious zone circled the Spectre's waist, Which seemed with strange device to symbol Time. It was a silver-gleaming thread of day Spiral about a jet-black band of night. This zone seemed ever to contract and all The frame with momentary spasms heaved In the strangling traction which did never cease. I cried unto the spectre, 'Time hath bound Thy ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... excitedly at the cloud, which, driven on with furious force by an upper current of wind unfelt below, was now bellying in a marked and abnormal fashion, while from the lowest point of the convexity appeared a spiral column of dense vapor rapidly elongating itself toward the sea whose waters assumed a black and sullen aspect, disturbed by chopping counter currents of short waves, which gradually, as the waterspout neared them, fell into its rotary ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... tell the nature of these purely organic substances and forms in the evil and in the good respectively: in the good the spiral forms travel forward, in the evil backward; the forward-traveling are turned to the Lord and receive influx from Him; the retrogressive are turned towards hell and receive influx from hell. It should be known that in the measure in which they turn ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... for the narrow spiral stairs that led to the main floor of the barn, stopped at its head, ...
— Youth • Isaac Asimov
... Trajan, only more lovely in the purity of its white marble, it was one of the rare objects of art that gave Warwick a claim to distinction and justified the pride of its citizens. Around it were carved innumerable figures of soldiers, climbing a spiral pathway. Indistinguishable now in the moonlight, they still remained in the memory, like the ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... page horizontally and give it a quick rotary motion while looking at the centre of the spiral, it will appear to revolve. Perhaps a good many readers are acquainted with this little optical illusion. But the puzzle is to show how I was able to draw this spiral with so much exactitude without using anything but a pair of compasses ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... groped in his mind for his science memories from school, from the Sunday supplements. "I can recall that our galaxy is a spiral like—" ...
— Old Rambling House • Frank Patrick Herbert
... recent meeting of the Royal Institution an ornamental lamp was placed on the library table, the elegant transparent paintings and spiral devices of which were kept in rotary motion by the action of the current of heated air issuing from the chimneys of the lamp, which contrivance is well adapted to a number ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 276 - Volume 10, No. 276, October 6, 1827 • Various
... plumage, as if the web off every quill in his great wings vibrated in his strong, level flight. I watched him as long as my eye could hold him. When he was fairly clear of the mountain he began that sweeping spiral movement in which he climbs the sky. Up and up he went without once breaking his majestic poise till he appeared to sight some far-off alien geography, when he bent his course thitherward and gradually vanished in the blue depths. The ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... his cigarette into the ash tray beside the match, where, smouldering, it sent up a gray spiral into the air of the library. Whether because of his words or because of the presence of the man himself, the warning, intuitive finger had again touched Paul Harley. "You saw or heard nothing on your way across the square ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... Spiral columns of black vapor twisted swiftly upward from the fiery depths, sometimes side by side, and sometimes they would unite and climb toward the opening above, like a couple of huge serpents struggling together. ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... during this period Valenciennes was the centre of a most interesting spiral movement (to use the phrase of Goethe) in the history of modern Europe. Coming down later to the contest between France, under Louis XIV., and the allies, led by Marlborough and Prince Eugene, we find Valenciennes again playing a leading part. And during the last blind, desperate effort of France ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... of mine in the Press Gallery used to represent "I have yet to learn that the Government" by a little twirl, and "What did the right honourable gentleman do, Mr. Speaker? He had the audacity" by two spiral dots. ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... she asked Choulette if he had finished the portrait of Misery on his stick. Misery had now become a figure of Piety, and Choulette recognized the Virgin in it. He had even composed a quatrain which he was to write on it in spiral form—a didactic and moral quatrain. He would cease to write, except in the style of the commandments of God rendered into French verses. The four lines expressed simplicity and goodness. ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... like the zigzag and the egg-and-dart, for example, had originally a symbolic value. Sometimes they are drawn from primitive structures and fabrics, as the checker-board pattern, with its likeness to the plaitings of rush mattings, and the volute and spiral ornaments, which recall the curves and involutions of wattle and wicker work. Again, decoration may employ in its service details that in themselves are genuinely representative art. The frieze of the Parthenon shows in relief a procession of men and women and horses and chariots and animals. ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... avenues of trees, past mossy marbles and old-time columns, and threading the grove by the bronze lion, came upon the tree-crowned terrace above the fountain. Below lay the basin shining in the sunlight. Flowering almonds encircled the terrace, and, in a greater spiral, groves of chestnuts wound in and out and down among the moist thickets by the western palace wing. At one end of the avenue of trees the Observatory rose, its white domes piled up like an eastern mosque; at the other end stood the heavy palace, with every window-pane ablaze in ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... overflowed during the spring freshets,—pestilence would soon be bred from the immense concourse of people: hence a system of cloacae, almost rivalling those of ancient Rome. At each street-corner there are wells containing spiral staircases, by which one can descend to the spacious subterranean passages, and there walk for miles under arches of hewn stone, lighted and aired by shafts at regular intervals. In St. Petersburg you are told that more than half the cost of the city is under the surface of the earth; at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... is known as the Imprintum. On either side rose lines of marble columns, their lofty capitals crowned with statues, their bases clustering with marble groups, while breaking now and then the white monotony, spiral and intertwining pillars of colored glass sprang into the air, like titanic tropical vines holding in extended fingers ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... were lighted with Yankee lamps and Pennsylvania petroleum. Postal boxes after the Yankee custom were erected and in use. Gingham umbrellas were replacing those made of oiled paper. Barbers' poles, painted white with the spiral red band, were set up, and within the shops Young Japan had his queue cut off and his hair dressed in foreign style. Ignorant of the significance of the symbolic relic of the old days, when the barber ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... still making itself perceptible to sight by the starry gleam in which the motion of its wings enveloped it. The infant on the floor followed its course with his sagacious little eyes. After flying about the room, it returned in a spiral curve and settled again ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... least two dozen of the reptiles, and it looked bad for us fellows aloft. Did you ever see a snake climb a rope? He goes up in a sort of wriggling spiral, wrapped loosely round it, but shifting his different sections up for a fresh grip. The other fellows climbed to the topmast-crosstrees and looked down; but the snakes stopped at the eyes of the rigging, ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... but is a triangular stalk with a single envelope with a pith on the inside, which could only be divided into slices with a knife, either in stripes of a width permitted by the sides of the prism, or else shaved round and round, like the operation of cork making, and producing a long spiral shaving. ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... always filled with cool water by an incessant stream from the cascade we have described, which always ran into and overflowed it. The arm of this head was fitted and made air-tight, also, into a spiral tube of copper, called the Worm, which rested in the water of the cooler; and as it consisted of several convolutions, like a cork-screw, its office was to condense the hot vapor which was transmitted to it from the glowing Still into that description ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... construction yet remaining in England. The arcade, triforium, and clerestory are in fine proportion; the nave has a vaulted roof of stone, and the alternate columns are clustered in plan, their middle shafts extending from floor to roof. These columns are enriched with zigzag, lattice, spiral, and vertical flutings. This cathedral, begun in 1093, was nearly two centuries building, and the Chapel of Nine Altars, in honor of various saints, was erected at the eastern end in the twelfth century. Some of these altars did duty for a pair of saints, St. Cuthbert sharing the central ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... enough, however, to allow Diamond to see that North Wind stood beside him. He looked up to find her face, and saw that she was no longer a beautiful giantess, but the tall gracious lady he liked best to see. She took his hand, and, giving him the broad part of the spiral stair to walk on, led him down a good way; then, opening another little door, led him out upon a narrow gallery that ran all round the central part of the church, on the ledges of the windows of the clerestory, and through openings in the ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... cacti lifted slender shafts, unfolding in spiral leaves as they shot upward and bursting at the top into plumes of yellow flowers. The blossoming stalks waved in the wind, and ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... left of the bay, the English saw the largest pirogue they had yet met with. It was no less than sixty-eight feet long, five wide, and three feet six inches high. It had in front a sculpture in relief, of grotesque taste, in which the lines were spiral and ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... did not hang down her back in the rich spiral curl which is now becoming so common among schoolgirls; for that it was too plentiful, too troublesomely luxuriant. It hung like heavy bronze in a thick stiff plait—a badge both of her robust youth and the redundant richness of her blood,—and at its extremity it was tied with ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... combination with two monarchs, despotic at heart and of enigmatical or indifferent religious convictions, who yet reigned over peoples, largely influenced by enthusiasm for freedom. Thus liberty was preserved for the world; but, as the law of human progress would seem to be ever by a spiral movement, it; seems strange to the superficial observer not prone to generalizing, that Calvinism, which unquestionably was the hard receptacle in which the germ of human freedom was preserved in various countries ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... that her son should keep his wife's company. Where it was most pleasing to the king and the queen to live was at Pontoise, because the king's chamber was above and the queen's below. And they had so well arranged matters that they held their converse on a spiral staircase which led down from the one chamber to the other. When the ushers saw the queen-mother coming into the chamber of the king her son, they knocked upon the door with their staves, and the king came ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... fighting a hard battle against inherited tendencies and an evil environment, for the fight, however fierce, is a good sign. Those alone are to be pitied who are drifting, and not resisting. Progress is ever by a steep and spiral pathway. Sometimes the face of the ascending soul is toward the sun and sometimes it is toward the darkness. No man can deliver his friend from the forces which oppose him. Each must conquer for himself and none can evade the conflict. From the hour when the soul awakens to a consciousness ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... elegant form. From whichever side they are seen, the curves are the perfection of flowing line. The colouring and ornament of each is a marvel and delight. Some are black, with white spots arranged in lines following the curves, and with the top of the blunt spiral white. These "black-and-white marble" patterns are followed by a whole series in which purple takes the place of black, and the spots are modified into scales. Then comes a row of rose-coloured shells, some with white lance-heads, or scales, others with alternate bands of ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... are deficient in the ewe, though this likewise occurs occasionally with the female of the wild musmon. In the rams of the Wallachian breed, "the horns spring almost perpendicularly from the frontal bone, and then take a beautiful spiral form; in the ewes they protrude nearly at right angles from the head, and then become twisted in a singular manner." (3/82. 'Youatt on Sheep' page 138.) Mr. Hodgson states that the extraordinarily arched nose or chaffron, which is so highly developed in several foreign breeds, is ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... the wings are capable of intensely rapid vibrations, so rapid indeed that, when flying, the wings are almost, if not quite, invisible. This intensely rapid movement enables them to fly, and is somewhat analogous to the rapid movements of the vertical spiral screws, which you have seen on some of the Martian air-ships that screw their way ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... arched window-space nearest to them. A thin spiral of blue-grey smoke curled through it and evaporated into the shadows of the trees. After a moment it was followed ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... outline he could faintly trace through the darkness, bound him to it, and then sat down to rest. After a little time he looked up,—and see! A light shone from one of the windows! He rose quickly, found a door, and felt his way up the narrow spiral staircase. At the top of the staircase was a door, which he opened, and found himself in a large baronial hall; but he hesitated to advance when he saw that the only person in it was a girl, who sat by the long table. She wore a black ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... this period was in constant political strife, yet rising slowly, like the spiral flight of an eagle, to heights of national greatness, intellectually it moved forward with bewildering rapidity. Printing was brought to England by Caxton (c. 1476), and for the first time in history it was possible for a book or an idea to reach the whole ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... the forward end is a metal bar having at the top a knob, K, which can be grasped conveniently in the fingers; at the other a brass screw, O, which is normally pulled down against the contact, N, by the spiral spring, S. The contact M under K is in connection with the binding post T1 and N with binding post T3; K is joined up to T2, and ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... different heights, any straight line embattled, few windows placed exactly over others, and the whole fitly surmounted by the elaborate brick chimneys of different designs, some fluted, others zigzagged, others spiral, ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... the visitor, yielding to the demands of a supposed necessity, is dragged a weary round—he must see the Falls from the front, from above, and from below; he must go behind them, and be drenched by them; he must descend spiral staircases at the risk of his limbs, and cross ferries at that of his life; he must visit Bloody Run, the Burning Springs, and Indian curiosity-shops, which have nothing to do with them at all; and when the poor wretch is thoroughly bewildered and wearied by "doing Niagara," he is allowed to steal ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... at the Gorgon!" cried the mother, as the battered head of an ancient doll was displayed over his shoulder by Perseus, decorated with two enormous snakes, one made of stamps, and the other a spiral of whalebone ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... bone called the hammer; the hammer beats against another called the anvil, and this against a third called the stirrup; and the quiver of the stirrup is passed on to a little window, opening into a little room with a spiral key-board; and from this, the wave travels along a nerve to the brain. As the waves reach the brain, the brain hears. In this way we hear all sorts of sounds, from the tick of a watch to ...
— The Child's Day • Woods Hutchinson
... afternoon when he saw a thin spiral of smoke from a rise of ground. Smoke meant that some human being was abroad in the land, and every man on the range called for investigation. The ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... shaft is constructed of thirty-four pieces of marble joined with bronze cramps. The figures on the pedestal are very finely carved, and the entire shaft is encircled by a series of elaborate bas-reliefs winding round it in a spiral from its base to its capital. The beauty of the work on this shaft may be best appreciated by a visit to the cast of it set up—in two heights, unfortunately—at the South Kensington Museum. The Column of Marcus Aurelius, ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... possible for them to get the information that coming down hadn't afforded. But he said nothing, because he had come to feel by this time that when Captain Greene did a thing he had a perfectly sound reason for his action. Nor was he wrong. Once more they climbed in a high spiral curve until they were higher than they had been before. For the first time, Frank now felt a peculiar ringing in his ears. He mentioned it, ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Trail • George Durston
... it in silence for a moment, then turned his eyes up, to the sky. Somewhere up there a tiny satellite spun wildly about the earth, a little silver ball in some celestial roulette wheel. Gradually it would spiral closer and closer, caught by the planet's implacable grasp, until it flared brightly like a cigarette in the heavens before dissolving into drops of ...
— Sound of Terror • Don Berry
... of these jays mounting from branch to branch around the stem of a pine tree, from the lower limbs to the top, as if he were ascending a spiral staircase. This seems to be one of their regulation habits when they find themselves under inspection. If you intrude on their domestic precincts, their cry is quite harsh, and bears no resemblance to the quaint calls of the eastern ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... and indeed as part of this structure, was a precentor's desk. The pulpit was, to Maimie's eyes, a wonder. It was an octagonal box placed high on one side of the church on a level with the gallery, and reached by a spiral staircase. Above it hung the highly ornate and altogether extraordinary sounding-board and canopy. There was no sign of paint anywhere, but the yellow pine, of which seats, gallery, and pulpit were all made, had deepened with age into a rich ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... intoxication. With his arm around her waist, he listened to her talking while the birds were warbling, noticed with the same glance the black grapes on her bonnet and the juniper-berries, the draperies of her veil, and the spiral forms assumed by the clouds, and when he bent towards her the freshness of her skin mingled with the strong perfume of the woods. They found amusement in everything. They showed one another, as a curiosity, gossamer threads ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... poor castaway Who sees a vessel drifting far astray Of his last hope, and lays him down to die. The children, riotous from school, grow bold And quarrel with the wind, whose angry gust Plucks off the summer hat, and flaps the fold Of many a crimson cloak, and twirls the dust In spiral shapes grotesque, and dims the gold Of gleaming tresses with the blur ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... more extraordinary still. There was a mast set up in the ground, thirty or forty feet high. At the ground, ten feet from the foot of the mast, there commenced an inclined plane, formed of a plank about a foot or eighteen inches wide, which ascended in a spiral direction round and round the mast till it reached the top. A man ascended this plane by means of a large ball, about two feet in diameter, which he rolled up standing upon it, and rolling it by stepping continually on the ascending side. There was ...
— Rollo in Paris • Jacob Abbott
... the westward, along those parallel rails now beginning to gleam in the rays of the sun. On the outer rim of the desert a black spiral of smoke was curling ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... again relapse into barbarism and the cycle begin again. He did not himself state this conclusion directly or venture on any prediction. It is obvious how readily his doctrine could be adapted to the conception of Progress as a spiral movement. Evidently the corresponding periods in his cycles are not identical or really homogeneous. Whatever points of likeness may be discovered between early Greek or Roman and medieval societies, the ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... indicated at A, Fig. 14. It is rather dificult to explain in print just how the graver should be held, but a little experiment will suffice to teach the proper position. The best indication that a graver is doing its work properly, is the fact that the chips come away in long spiral coils. Aim to see how light a cut you can make rather than how heavy. Never use force in removing the material, but depend entirely upon the keenness of the cutting edges. Never use the point of the graver, except where you are compelled to, but rather use the right or left hand cutting ...
— A Treatise on Staff Making and Pivoting • Eugene E. Hall
... an extensive building of rambling construction—with parts disused and dilapidated—quite a little settlement, counting some 150 inmates, nuns, pupils and teachers; with cells and dormitories, long corridors, chapels, kitchens, distillery, spiral staircases and mysterious nooks and corners; a large garden planted with chestnut trees, a kitchen garden, and a little cemetery without gravestones, over-grown with evergreens and flowers. The sisters were all English, Irish, or Scotch, but the majority ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... themselves behind a buttress, they awaited his coming in breathless silence. As soon as he arrived at arm's length, he was suddenly seized, and, before he could open his lips to raise an alarm, the silence of death closed them up for ever. They next descended rapidly the spiral staircase of the tower, and opening the portal, admitted the whole of their companions. Raymond of Toulouse, who, cognisant of the whole plan, had been left behind with the main body of the army, heard at this instant the signal horn, which announced that an entry had been ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... expensive-looking, gold-tipped one. Now he removed it from between his lips with that hand that always shook a little, and dropped it to the floor, crushing it lightly with the toe of his boot. He threw back his handsome head and sent out the last mouthful of smoke in a thin, lazy spiral. I remember thinking what a pity it was that he should have crushed that costly-looking cigarette, just ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... individuals of the colony living in cells strung on one or both sides along a hollow stem, and communicating by means of a common flesh in this central tube. Some graptolites were straight, and some curved or spiral; some were single stemmed, and others consisted of several radial stems united. Graptolites occur but rarely in the Upper Cambrian. In the Ordovician and Silurian they are very plentiful, and at the close of ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... room and the draftsman's room there is a door that opens on a small dark spiral stairway that winds from the lower floor to the ceiling at ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... stand up to go through the figures till she caught sight of the celebrated esthete, the Swami Ram Chandra Gunga Din, who was there to hand out the right slants about oriental effects and who had persuaded Marie there was great consolation to be found in realizing that life is a spiral and that therefore you can't make progress straight up but must go round and round through rhythmic alternations of joy and sorrow, which caused Chunk to relapse again from his attentiveness but which pleased Marie greatly because she was always unhappy ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... as it is called in the orchestra, is the sweetest and mellowest of all the wind instruments. In Beethoven's time it was but little else than the old hunting-horn, which, for the convenience of the mounted hunter, was arranged in spiral convolutions that it might be slipped over the head and carried resting on one shoulder and under the opposite arm. The Germans still call it the Waldhorn, i.e., "forest horn;" the old French name was cor de chasse, the Italian corno di ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... even line is required, this is a most suitable stitch to employ. It is equally in request for outline and filling in, and its chain-like adaptability makes it specially good for following out curved forms or spiral lines. Tambour stitch is practically the same in result, though worked in quite a different manner, for it is carried out in a frame with a fine crochet hook, instead of with a needle. This makes it quicker in execution, but more mechanical in appearance, ...
— Embroidery and Tapestry Weaving • Grace Christie
... in a spiral course, making an ever-widening circle, looking sharply from left to right. Presently they came to the remains of the fire. The ashes were hotter than the ground, proving that ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl
... one at the apex being the donjon. The form of this lofty keep is rectangular, and the machicolations and embattlements which were added in the fifteenth century are in a perfect state of preservation. Upon the platform, which I was able to reach by means of ladders and the half-ruinous spiral staircase, viper's bugloss spread its brilliant blue flowers over the dark stones, and enticed the high-soaring bees. The view of the wide and beautiful Dordogne Valley from these old battlements was not less grand because more than one-half ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... perfection of knowledge, put in the seed the wrong end up, and, instead of the carrots presenting themselves to the earnest inquirer in what is, I believe, the ordinary fashion, with the green tops showing above the generous earth, and the spiral, rosy-tinted, cylindrical form hidden in the soil, the limb were to grow out of the ground, its head downward; would that be nothing, do you think? I mention that only as a possibility that flashed across my mind. There are an illimitable series of possibilities ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., October 25, 1890 • Various
... laid down their burden, which was nothing else than the tightly bound body of Jerkline Jo. All three men wore masks over their faces and new bright-blue overalls to further aid in hiding their identities. Hiram saw the rope about the girl, running in a spiral from her shoulders to her ankles. He saw the cloth over her face, ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... quarters. There had been residential wings attached, dating from the mid-eighteenth century, but these had been pulled down and used for the foundations of the new mansion. Now it stood a lonely shell, its three storeys, each a single great room connected by a spiral stone staircase, being dedicated to lumber and the storage of produce. But it was dry and intact, its massive oak doors defied any weapon short of artillery, its narrow unglazed windows would scarcely have admitted a cat—a ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... Hence the same names can be given to the homologous bones in widely different animals. We see the same great law in the construction of the mouths of insects: what can be more different than the immensely long spiral proboscis of a sphinx-moth, the curious folded one of a bee or bug, and the great jaws of a beetle? Yet all these organs, serving for such widely different purposes, are formed by infinitely numerous ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... honest, warm-hearted man of principle of the present day so to discipline his mind by reflection on the circumstances and received moral system of the Stuarts' age (from Elizabeth to the death of Charles I), and its proper place in the spiral line of ascension, as to be able to regard the Duke of Buckingham as not a villain, and to resolve many of the acts of those Princes into passions, conscience-warped and hardened by half-truths and the secular creed of prudence, as being itself virtue ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... it takes us from the corner of the canvas to the extreme distance and thence in a circuit back; in another it moves on a flat plane like an ellipse in perspective. Again, first catching the eye in the centre, it unfolds like a spiral. ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... standing figure. If we think of the horse of Marcus Aurelius as taking the next step, we think of a straightened leg set on the ground instead of a curved leg suspended in the air. And if we think of the Myronian Discobolus as letting go his quoit and "recovering," we think of the matchless spiral composition as unwinding and straightening itself into a shape as different as that of a tree is different from that ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... "We have learned a lot, Siddhartha, there is still much to learn. We are not going around in circles, we are moving up, the circle is a spiral, we have already ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... examined with the same lens as before. The field presented to the eye is depicted in Fig. 1, B, where it is visible that while the original organism persists yet a new organism has arisen in and invaded the fluid. It is a relatively long and beautiful spiral form, and now the movement in the field is entrancing. The original organism darts with its vigor and grace, and rebounds in all directions. But the spiral forms revolving on their axes glide like a flight of swallows over the ample area of their little sea. Ten hours more elapsed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... six weeks after issuing from the egg. s spiral fold of gut, b rudimentary belly-fin. (From ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... or muffori is a most curious animal, almost peculiar, I believe, to this island and Sardinia, though a variety of the species is found in Morocco. Something between a sheep, a deer, and a goat, the male has spiral horns like a goat, rather turned back, with the legs and hind-quarter of a goat, but the head of a sheep. The colour is a reddish brown, with some admixture of black and white, brown predominating. The skin is fine-grained, not woolly but fine-haired, like a deer. It is extremely ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... spiral stair, he said to himself that, no matter how long he remained in Leipzig, he would never trouble Schwarz with his presence again. The man was a loose-mouthed bully. But in future he might seek out others to be the butt of his clumsy wit. He, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... hasten and ease the labour. She may be given water to drink in which the feet of her husband [64] or her mother-in-law or a young unmarried girl have been dipped, or she is shown the swastik or some other lucky sign, or the chakra-vyuha, a spiral figure showing the arrangement of the armies of the Pandavas and Kauravas which resembles the intestines with the exit at ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... are perforated with regurgitating tubes. Behind and above the gallery that surmounts the three fireplaces are high Gothic windows, the tracery of which masks, in some sort, the chimneys; and in each angle of this and of the room to the right and left of the trio of chimneys is an open-work spiral staircase, ascending to—I forget where; perhaps to the roof of the edifice. The whole side of the salle is very lordly, and seems to express an unstinted hospitality, to extend the friendliest ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... phenomena. A light vapour, the lightest, airiest of the airiest, swept gently along the surface of the ground, but as if unimpelled by any secret influence. It was also dead calm. The vapour continued to sweep before us, till at length it suddenly rose up to the sky in the form of a spiral column of air, and then disappeared. In this valley, which widened as we advanced, we once or twice saw the mirage running along the ground like prostrate columns of foam, striking ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... is with her heart disease that the Reverend Mother rules the convent," Evelyn thought, as she followed Sister Mary John up the spiral staircase to the organ loft. She looked over the curtained railing into the church. The watcher knelt there, her head bowed, her habit still as sculpture, and Evelyn heard Sister Mary John pulling out ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... country had to be crossed from which clouds of dust and ashes were continually rising, blown up by "Willy-Willies" (spiral winds). These were most deceptive, it being very hard to distinguish between them and hunting-smokes. After one or two disappointments we were able to determine, from a distance, the nature of these clouds of black dust. On the 22nd we ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... dark pine blasted, bare, and cleft, The veil of cloud was lifted, and below Glowed the rich valley, and the river's flow Was darkened by the forest's shade, Or glistened in the white cascade; Where upward, in the mellow blush of day, The noisy bittern wheeled his spiral way. ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... trees which distinctly appeared, of no great extent. I took the glass, but through it everything presented a wavering appearance, as though the island and all upon it consisted of an infinite number of separate and distinct particles, each revolving in a spiral direction upwards. I called Ella on deck to see the singular phenomenon, for it was a more perfect example of mirage than I had ever before witnessed or could have believed possible. As we continued to ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... pencil sketch to which I have referred, is that of a screw propeller, drawn by my father, dated 1819. It was the result of many discussions as to the proper mode of propelling a vessel. First, he had drawn Watt's idea of a "spiral oar"; then, underneath, he has drawn his own idea, of a disk of six. blades, like a screw-jack, immediately behind the rudder. There is a crank shown on the screw shaft, by which the propeller was driven direct, showing that he was the first to indicate that method of propulsion ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... and sure enough, the box rose steadily upwards until it came within his grasp. "I am going to send it down to you again," he continued, and I expected to see it drop like a stone to the ground; but, strange to say, it circled gracefully through the air in a spiral curve, and landed ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... philosophers, you have taken no notice of the stupendous Des Cartes, with his wonderful system of whirlpools (vortices) and particles, cubic, conic, striate, oblong, globular, hooked, crooked, spiral and angular: for who the devil but a mere tipsy, giddy brains, could have dished up such a confounded hotch-potch and gallimatias of whimsical rotations, or fancied that the whole earth whirled round like a town-top, had not Vinorum ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... of champagne and a quart of mineral water (both taboo) at his elbow. In a tall glass the rind of a Syrian orange was arranged in spiral form. The wine bubbled and seethed; and the exquisite bouquet of ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... circumstance again which made the case a kind of developed romance. But as an end implies a beginning, and the one is certainly as necessary as the other, we request you to accompany us—taking care of your feet—up the narrow spiral staircase of a tenement called Corbet's Land, in the same old town where so many wonderful things in the complicated drama—or dream, if you are a Marphurius—of human life have occurred. Up which spiral stair having got by the help ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... buildings. Andreo shuddered for the first time, and tightened his arm about Pilar's shaking body. He knew that they were to be locked in the dungeons. Pilar, almost fainting, shrank back as they reached the narrow spiral stair which led downward to the cells. "Ay! I shall die, my Andreo!" she cried. "Ay! ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... to be struck by the lightning than any other. It is a curious fact that the electric fluid invariably follows the grain the wood. I have often noticed in pines which had been struck, that the fluid had followed the grain in a spiral form, encircling the tree three or four times in its descent to the earth. I have myself witnessed some extraordinary effects produced by lightning. I remember that, not more than two years since, I had occasion to go out into the township of Douro to attend the sitting of the Council of ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... to the inner hall and the stairway, which I consider the best thing in the house. Instead of the usual steep and gloomy stairs with which we are all familiar, here is a graceful spiral stairway which runs from this floor to the roof. The stair hall has two walls made up of mirrors in the French fashion, that is, cut in squares and held in place by small rosettes of gilt, and these mirrored walls seemingly double the spaciousness ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... Here clustered the elite of the swimmers; here they discussed the great principles of their art, and passed judgment on the performances of those less skilful than themselves. To the right of the Amphitheatre rose a slender spiral staircase, like an openwork pillar of iron, with a tiny circular platform on the top, half surrounded by a light iron rail. This conspicuous perch, like the pillar of St. Simeon Stylites, was every now and then ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... be regarded as self-evident or as needing no demonstration. The force of a magnetic pole on a magnetized steel scrap, for instance, varies as the inverse cube of the distance; and the curve described by such a particle would be quite different from a conic section—it would be a definite class of spiral (called Cotes's spiral). Again, on an iron filing the force of a single pole might vary more nearly as the inverse fifth power; and so on. Even when the thing concerned is radiant in straight lines, ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... is a relief to get this load off our minds: I could do a little ladylike yowling myself," Margaret said; and Crane, lying completely at ease, a thin spiral of smoke curling upward from ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... did not cringe and whine. Instead he became defiant—just like a very bad boy. He held up his head and curled his trunk tight in a spiral in front of his chest. In an elephant that is a sign that he is defiant or determined, just like a man who folds his arms tight across his ...
— The Wonders of the Jungle, Book Two • Prince Sarath Ghosh
... DISENGAGEMENT contact with the opponent's rifle is abandoned and the point of the bayonet is circled under or over his bayonet or rifle and directed into the opening attacked. This attack is delivered by one continuous spiral movement of the bayonet from the moment ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department
... Mr. Martin with a vindictive gleam in his eye, "when you give a man one of these here spiral staircase cigars? Old Peter himself couldn't keep straight along one subject if he tackled a cigar like this. Well, sir, I always thought Mel had a mighty mean time of it. He had to take care of his mother and two sisters, his little brother and an aunt that lived ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... macchinisti of the seventeenth century had vulgarized the motive, Correggio's bold attempt to paint heaven in flight from earth—earth left behind in the persons of the apostles standing round the empty tomb, heaven soaring upward with a spiral vortex into the abyss of light above—had an originality which set at naught all criticism. There is such ecstasy of jubilation, such rapturous rapidity of flight, that we who strain our eyes from below feel we are in the darkness of the grave which ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... I should doubt indeed if it advanced more quickly than a man could walk; at any rate so it seemed to us. But we had no means of judging its real rate of progress whereof we knew as little as we did of the course it followed in the bowels of the earth. Perhaps that was spiral, from the world's deep heart upwards, and this was the highest point it reached. Or perhaps it remained stationary, but still spinning, for scores or hundreds of years in some central powerhouse of its own, whence, in obedience to unknown laws, from ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... aisle is known as The Monks' Door, and is the regular entrance into the cathedral from the south. It opened from the eastern walk of the cloister. It is of later date than the wall in which it is placed. The ornamentation is very rich; one spiral column is especially noteworthy. There is a trefoiled arch, the cusps having circular terminations with the star ornament. In the spandrels are quaint, crouching monks, each holding a pastoral staff. Above are two ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ely • W. D. Sweeting
... to support the stone should have a spiral at the bottom in which to lay the gem, and this should be so placed that the latter will be completely submerged at all times, but not touching bottom or sides of ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... years, partook of the exhilaration enough to delight in an extraordinary enterprise, and as nothing remained but a little sweeping up, they left this to the superintendence of Mary and Mr. Wilmot, and embarked upon the narrow crumbling steps of the spiral stair, that led up within an unnatural thickening of one of the great piers that supported the tower, at the intersection of nave and transepts. After a long period of dust and darkness, and the monotony of always going with the same leg foremost, came a narrow ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... more I heard it the better I liked it, until I would gladly have given any of my songsters at home for a bird that could shower down such notes, even in autumn. Up, up, went the bird, describing a large easy spiral till he attained an altitude of three or four hundred feet, when, spread out against the sky for a space of ten or fifteen minutes or more, he poured out his delight, filling all the vault with ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... of an apple in the orchard, which Voltaire has transmitted to us from a fairly good source, has no first-hand authority. But the crowd has always accepted it as a gospel truth, and by a sound instinct. The Milky Way itself is pictured by its latest investigators as a vague spiral scarcely to be distinguished from the ascending smoke ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... knight and maiden to Mistress Underdone. Having alighted from the horse, Clarice shook down her riding-gown, and humbly followed Sir Gilbert and the guide into the great hall, which was built like a church, with centre and aisles, up a spiral staircase at one end of it, and into a small room hung with green say [Note 3]. Here they had to wait a while, for every one was too busily employed in the reception of the royal guests to pay attention to such comparatively ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... "I see what he did. This is the old spiral stairway that goes round the inside of the Keep. There are two doorways at the bottom. One opens into the courtyard, the other is a postern gate through the curtain wall to the outside—but that was closed up in the sixteenth century, ...
— The Eyes Have It • Gordon Randall Garrett
... bilateral debt, leading to a cancellation of rescheduling agreements with official and private creditors. Devaluation of its Francophone currency by 50% in January 1994 did not set off an expected inflationary spiral but the government must continue to keep a tight reign on ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... man now knows. You feel yourself encompassed by truth, vital and strong. This art, erstwhile so baffling, stands revealed as the struggle of a superhuman entity for self-expression. The tendency toward God has to begin anew with each round of the life-spiral - that eternal circle which ...
— The Fourth Dimensional Reaches of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition • Cora Lenore Williams
... passed. In the sorghum patch the eldest brother placidly dropped seed. Across the road the youngest lay on his back beside his herd pony. And, inside, by a window, the biggest sat and watched the smoke, now a wavering spiral in the light breeze that fanned the prairie; while their mother, knowing that the best way to receive an Indian is with corn-cakes and coffee, stood over the kitchen stove. But the little girl kept her sentinel place on the rain-barrel until the sun veered her shadow from ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... certain stormy day in the great northern city, preparing for what he regarded as his career, James sat in the same large, shabbily furnished room where his mother had once visited him—half-way up the hideously long spiral stair of an ancient house, whose entrance was in a narrow close. The great clock of a church in the neighbouring street had just begun to strike five of a wintry afternoon, dark with snow, falling and yet to fall: how often ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... indeed it is true, that by comparing the two extremes of the path traversed by humanity we find that there has really been a true progress, an improvement taking it all in all; but, in any case, progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but, as Goethe has said, a spiral with rhythms of progress and of retrogression, of ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... Greek mythology a sea deity, son of Poseidon and Amphitrite; upper part of a man with a dolphin's tail; often represented as blowing a large spiral shell; there were several of them, and were heralds ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... sat still, and the moon at last sailed out of the feathery clasp of the elm branches, and the whole landscape was in a pale, clear glow. Then Horace came. Rose started up. She stood for an instant irresolute, then she stole out of her room and down the spiral stair very noiselessly. She opened the front door before Horace could insert his key in ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... there were great bill-toppers, creators of sensations who discovered new things—terrifying feats of gyroscopic balancing, or flights through space, based upon principles of ballistics, assisted by the spiral spring—daring risk-alls, nerve-shakers, purveyors of thrills, turning to intelligent account the seductive power which dangerous feats exercise upon the public. Jimmy knew all about that. He was not the only one; but, this time, it was a question of a scientific application ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... numerous battle-axes[261] of bronze, some double-bladed daggers with crooked ends, lances similar to those discovered at Koban,[262] and thousands of spits, some with spherically shaped heads, others of spiral form. Some of these spits are made of copper, as are some large nails weighing thirty ounces, so that this metal was evidently still often used in ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... intensely cold. However, the majority of the nebulae that have been examined are not gaseous, and have a very different structure from the loose and diffused clouds of gas. They show two (possibly more, but generally two) great spiral arms starting from the central part and winding out into space. As they are flat or disk-shaped, we see this structure plainly when they turn full face toward the earth, as does the magnificent nebula in Canes Venatici. In it, and many others, we clearly trace a condensed ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... his reign, and he was a very great builder and improver, so that one of his successors called him a wall-flower, because his name was everywhere to be seen on walls and bridges and roads—some of which still remain, as does his tall column at Rome, with a spiral line of his conquests engraven round it from top to bottom. He was on his way back from the East when, in 117, he died at Cilicia, leaving the empire to another brave warrior, Publius AEtius Hadrianus, who took the command with great vigor, but found he could not keep Dacia, and broke down the ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the polyps good-by, turned his back upon Coraltown, and presently found a fellow-passenger fine enough to absorb all his attention,—a passenger, I say, but we shall find it rather a group of passengers in their own pretty boat; some curled in spiral coils, some trailing like little swimmers behind, some snugly ensconced inside, but all of such brilliant colors and gay bearing that even the star-fish felt his inferiority; and, wishing to make friends ...
— The Stories Mother Nature Told Her Children • Jane Andrews
... the Chou dynasty (1122-225 B.C.) for the purpose of giving military signals. A Chinese origin is still more clearly indicated by the decorative designs, which show a combination of the circle, the triangle, and the spiral, obviously identical with the decorative motive* on Chinese drums of the Han dynasty (202 B.C.-A.D. 220). The circle and the triangle occur also in the sepulchral pottery of the Yamato sites, and considering the fact together with ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi |
